CREATURE FEATURE: Another spate of comics reviews! In alphabetical order:

Astro City: “Tarnished Angel.” Good enough for government work. A serviceable and intermittently affecting look at what it means for a guy with superpowers to fail. Not so much my thing, but sweet in its ten-cent-noir-ish way. The Robert Mitchum-inspired pictures of the protagonist are especially fine. OTOH if I want to see superheroic failure, I’ll absolutely pick up New X-Men, where I can feed my Cyclops obsession.

Creature Tech: Now this is a weird little morsel. I’d seen it referred to on many a comics site, but finally picked it up after reading Mark Shea’s minireview (of interest for people who want to know what non-comics-types think about comics–hi Sean, this means you!). It’s a hilarious, bouncy, and engaging read, swinging breezily from intelligent design theory to giant space eels. The art is fanciful, unpretentious, and fun. I lapped it up like it was liquid candy.

But in the end, I did wonder whether there was less to Creature Tech than meets the eye. There’s a crucial scene (the one with the brotherhood of the square, for those who have read it already) that seemed to come out of nowhere and failed to justify itself in the narrative, in my opinion. Admittedly this scene dealt with one of the most obscure motions of the human heart; but still, I think we needed a little more for the protagonist’s development to be believable. By the same token, although I strongly approve of the dramatic use of the “irreducible complexity” concept at the very end of the book, for the most part the book neither justifies its intelligent-design themes nor attempts to address the (to my mind quite powerful) criticisms of the theory advanced by Father Edward Oakes here.

So. In the end, I recommend CT–it’s fun!–but am not sure I can endorse it as anything other than fun-with-outcasts type hijinks. That’s totally fine, but somewhat less than I was expecting. Anyway, might change my mind, and if so I will definitely let you know.

Daredevil: “Lowlife,” “Out,” “Underboss,” “Wake Up!”: Okay, so I got a little bit obsessed with the Brian Bendis Daredevils! And they were worth every daggone penny, my friend. Not as gobsmacking as the first Alias collection (see previous post about page layouts…), but really, these comics grabbed me and have not yet let me go. Not sure what to say except, if you’re a) not skipping this post and b) not already a Bendis aficionado, why not check these books out?

The one outlier is “Wake Up!”, which I’d mentioned earlier; although its child-abuse theme is both overworked and obvious, I didn’t really care, because the script was more innovative than any I’ve seen on the same subject; and, more importantly, the art was so vivid and tactile that for the next hour or so I was far more aware of every shape and pattern around me. I walked home from Georgetown staring at every ivy tendril and curl of black iron, because I was simply more aware of my surroundings than I had been before I picked up the book. Good stuff.